Saturday, May 16, 2009

It goes to show that if there is a will, there certainly can be a way. State Senator Lazich refuses to acknowledge the will, and automatically goes to the claim that there will never be a way due to “few riders” and the “failure to reduce congestion and pollution”. Indeed, senator. So in the meantime, Lazich and her pals in the legislature enjoyed spending $1.9 billion of your tax dollars to reconstruct and add two additional lanes on I-94 from the I-894 interchange to the Illinois State Line. Furthermore, the state plans to spend upwards of $1.1 billion of your tax dollars on highway improvements in the Fox Cities, as well as upwards of $1 billion of your tax dollars to reconstruct the Zoo Interchange. Also, don’t forget the $810 million

Add those numbers up, folks. $4.81 BILLION of your tax dollars spent on freeways, $3 BILLION of which is in the Milwaukee metropolitan area. In the meantime, Lazich is having a hoot over a regional transit authority collecting funds to construct a $300 million commuter rail line, and conservative talk radio hosts have a bird over a $50 million downtown streetcar system and $100 million in bus rapid transit ideas. If you put the KRM, the streetcar, and BOTH Walker’s and Barrett’s bus rapid transit ideas in action, it would be roughly $550 million - which would only be a little over 1/4 what the total cost is for the I-94 project currently underway.

That alone places doubt in Lazich’s anger and points, and raises questions as to the true motives of why other means of transportation aren’t wanted by some conservative leaders and talkers.

1 comment:

If nothing else, conservatives should be urged to read the following from Heritage Foundation creator Paul M. Weyrich on how to properly distinguish between good transit projects and bad transit projects:

http://www.apta.com/research/info/online/weyrich2new.cfm

To help dispell the misinformation that anti-transit folks are spreading, I am beginning a project to post about 40 minutes of video discussion on Dane County’s proposed RTA here: